BRIEFCASE

Workplace

Gym for Tenants: First it was a fancy restaurant inside your office building. Then some buildings began offering services like car detailing, with eager workers in the parking garage painstakingly buffing your Mercedes while you made the big deals.

Finally, one building even put a helicopter landing pad on the roof--anything to distinguish itself from the other glass boxes down the street and get some tenants in the door.

With a glut of office space, scaring up tenants is getting harder and harder. Now comes Brinderson Towers with yet another wrinkle: a gym right in the building.

Other office towers have gyms next door. But this one is right on the first floor of the building, which is in Irvine overlooking the marshes of Newport Beach's Back Bay. It's a small gym, but it allows executives to save time by not having to go far to work out.

Many of the tenants of the two 13-story office towers--the gym is in Brinderson Tower II--are lawyers, a spokesman said. They can squeeze out more billable hours if they don't have to take a long lunch to exercise.

Clearly, the building could use the extra pizazz: After three years, it's still only two-thirds leased.